


A Wilderness of Monkeys

by a_t_rain



Category: Merchant of Venice - Shakespeare, SHAKESPEARE William - Works
Genre: F/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-14
Updated: 2014-11-14
Packaged: 2018-02-25 09:32:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 11,912
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2616968
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_t_rain/pseuds/a_t_rain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two years after the end of <i>Merchant</i>, Shylock travels to Belmont looking for revenge.  What he finds is more complicated.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Who Chooseth Me Shall Gain What Many Men Desire

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, I know there is no good excuse for this pairing. It just ... happened.

Dusk was already falling, but Shylock found the chatelaine of Belmont in the gardens, her golden hair loose. She was romping with a child, a little boy upwards of a year old, and for a moment Shylock thought he had misjudged the situation. Then he saw that there was a second woman present – a woman who looked rather like a lawyer’s clerk that he had seen once – and it was this woman who gathered up the child and carried him indoors as mothers do, and the laughter in Portia’s eyes faded and gave way to something like hunger. No. He had not misjudged.

“Good evening, Daniel,” he said softly, so that only she could hear.

She turned, startled.

“Or Balthasar, if you will.”

“I do not know you,” she said. It was an unconvincing lie, but he thought he would let it pass for the moment.

“It has been two years since we met. My name is Shylock. Shylock the Christian.” By now he had acquired a habit of flinging out this last phrase as one might fling offal to a dog. He saw that she caught the full measure of bitterness in his voice, and that it unsettled her.

“I have nothing to give you,” she said.

“I did not come here to beg anything of you.”

“Why did you come, then?” She had looked him over by now. He was not poor, except by comparison to his former substance, but he had worn his most threadbare garments, believing that the sight of them would shake her out of her complacency.

“I would have you look upon your handiwork,” he said.

She said nothing for a moment. What does a woman say to a man she has done her best to destroy? “How did you know I was Balthasar?” she asked at last.

So her first instinct was detachment, logic, curiosity. Shylock filed this information away for future reference and decided to tell her the truth. He had, after all, a grudging respect for her intellect. “I knew that you were no man from the moment I saw you. And I had heard Bassanio was lately married to the cousin of Signor Bellario of Padua; it was not so hard to reason it out.”

“Then you must have known that I came there to save his friend. Why did you not expose me?”

He had not expected her to reach the point so soon, but he welcomed the question. “It seemed to me that you might change sides when you knew all.”

It was too dark to see whether she was blushing. “I know not what you mean,” she said after a short pause.

“Madam, I think you do.”

He could remember Antonio’s exact words, the same way he remembered everything about the day that had seen his ruin. _Say how I loved you, speak me fair in death; and when the tale is told, bid her be judge whether Bassanio had not once a love._ And Bassanio’s reply: _My wife and all the world are not with me esteemed above thy life. I would lose all, ay, sacrifice them all here to this devil to deliver you._ He remembered the supposed doctor’s face at that moment. Oh yes, she had understood.

“I had thought you might be inclined to seek revenge.”

“You know nothing of us,” Portia said angrily. “I am a Christian!”

“Why, so am I!” said Shylock. “If I had any illusions that Christians are better than other men and women – I do not say I ever did, look you, but _if_ I did, they are gone now. You will revenge yourselves as swiftly, and as bloodily, as any other people.”

“I would not.”

“No? I wonder ... If you were in that court again, today, knowing all that you know, what would you do?”

She was silent for a moment. Calculating, Shylock thought. If Antonio had been removed from the world then, with her husband in his first flush of love for his rich bride – if she had returned home in time to comfort him in his grief – what might have been? Might not the scales have balanced, if only one side had been lighter by a pound of flesh?

“Go away,” she said, and the harshness in her voice told him that his words had shown her a side of herself she wished to banish. “I did not bid thee come.”

“Quite so. Sometimes I come unlooked-for; it is so with the instruments of our just revenges. They come to hand, and find us.”

“I do not understand.”

“You need not understand. Look for me in the summerhouse tomorrow night, if you will. If you will not, so.” He turned and walked away.

* * *

After that, it was easy to cuckold Bassanio.

Not that he had any deep grudge against the prodigal. No, cuckolding him was a sort of side benefit. He had come, rather, to try Bassanio’s lady’s virtue and show her to be made of flesh and blood, to take the smug air of saintliness from her – and that proved to be easy.

She came the next night, moving through the darkness without a lamp or candle. “Speak not,” she said, her voice low and rough. He wondered how it was that a creature with all other womanly beauties had not been given a beautiful voice.

Her mouth found his; he felt her draw back a little at the roughness of his beard, and then push forward, her hands about his neck. Instinctively, he reached upward to remove them – he had not forgotten who she was and why she had come, and he would not leave his throat unguarded – but she had already taken her hands away and begun to remove his shirt...

For a moment, he was afraid that he might not be able to do what she had come to do. He was past fifty, and he had not been with a woman since Leah died, except for that one time with Jessica’s nurse, and that had been a futile attempt to replace something that could not be replaced. And then she slid downward, and _good God, where did these Christian women learn to do such things with their tongues?_ – he found that he was not so old, after all – _did she do that with Bassanio? – trying to make him forget who she was, or who she was not?_

He did not ask her. They coupled as animals do, urgently, without words and without joy, and they did not speak afterward. She had told him not to speak. He found it harder to obey than he would have expected.

They lay on the floor of the summerhouse for some few minutes. Lay separately, because neither of them made a move toward the other; neither did they turn away and reach at once for their clothes. He knew what one did with a woman one loved, and what one did after making a very awkward mistake; what did one do when one hated?

The night was growing cold. Portia rolled over, sat up, and began to pull on her gown. He had a brief, inexplicable impulse to help her with the buttons, but that would be absurd. He dressed. Still neither of them spoke.

“Wait a quarter of an hour before you go,” she said, and he watched from the summerhouse as she half-ran toward Belmont. There were candles in the windows even at this late hour, and they seemed to throw their light very far, far enough for anyone to pick out the small, furtive figure of the great house’s mistress. She knew not how to move stealthily, Shylock thought; she had always lived too much in the light.

He waited a quarter of an hour, or perhaps longer, and slipped away in the opposite direction. He knew how to blend with the night. But as it happened, he was the one who ended up being caught.

* * *

Shylock froze, blinded as a lantern shone into his eyes. The person carrying the lantern froze, too. A dog yipped – one of those absurd little lap dogs – and the person shushed it. It was a woman. He knew her voice.

“Father?”

“I have no children. Go home.”

“I’m Jessica.”

“I know who you are. You are as one dead to me.”

Jessica took a step backward, but her voice was steady as she answered him. “I did not know you were given to talking with the dead.”

“Why, I am as one dead, too. Why should the dead not talk to the dead? Who else will keep them company?” This wasn’t what he had meant to say, but now that he was face to face with his daughter, he found that he could not stop himself. “What were you thinking, child? Did you think there would be no price to pay for what you did?”

“No,” said Jessica. “I knew I would have to pay the price.”

“You thought _you_ were the one to pay? Is that what you thought? What of the price I paid?” He found himself enumerating his losses, although the jewels weren’t the point, not at all. “A diamond, worth two thousand ducats; a casket of rubies and sapphires, five thousand ducats in all; two sealed bags of gold in double ducats –”

“I thought of it in the light of a dowry.” She was trying to be flippant and not succeeding; it was a way of speaking that had exasperated him when he was her father.

“So. You thought that if I would not give you my blessing, you would steal it. Is _that_ what you thought?”

“You are shouting. You will wake my husband.”

For the first time, he thought to wonder what Jessica was doing out of doors at midnight. It occurred to him that she might be pursuing an illicit affair of her own, but when the dog began to yap again, he dismissed the idea. Even his daughter could not possibly be foolish enough to take that creature with her.

“I take Blanche out walking sometimes when I cannot sleep,” said Jessica, a little defensively, as if she were reading his thoughts.

“And _why_ can you not sleep, hmm?”

“Never you mind,” said Jessica. “You have said you are not my father.” She stooped to pick up the dog and took a step toward the threshold of the house behind her. “For God’s sake come indoors and sit you down. It is very late.”

Shylock was on the point of refusing, but he found that he felt too exhausted and too cold to demur. He was too old to go around fornicating with heiresses, particularly outdoors on a chilly night. He would warm himself at her fire for a few minutes, he thought, and then go. It would mean nothing.

Jessica opened the door of the house and moved into the light, and he saw two things that surprised him and made him wonder if he had been wrong to show her so much anger. His daughter was wearing a turquoise ring on her left hand. And she was pregnant.

Perhaps it was a trick of the light, but she looked very like her mother.

Leah would not have worn a gown like that, of course, with bare shoulders and half her bosom showing. And she certainly would not have made herself ridiculous by kissing a Maltese dog on the nose, as Jessica was doing, or wasted her time braiding ribbons into its hair. No, he had been quite right to be angry with her.

Jessica took two cups from a cupboard and filled them from a pot that stood on the hearth. He recognized the liquid as coffee, a fashionable – and expensive – beverage in Venice. Paid for with his money, he supposed. Well. That meant he might as well enjoy it.

“So. When did you mean to tell me about my grandchild?”

She shrugged. “There would have been time enough. You never wrote or sent word to us, not even to ask how we were.”

He wanted to take her by the shoulders and say, _There is not time enough, we have so, so little time._ Leah had died of childbed fever before Jessica was a week old.

He said, “There is better coffee in Venice. How much did you pay for this?”

“You need not drink it if you disapprove!”

“I did not say that. Look you, how you take everything I say amiss!”

“Good night, Father. I’ll put new linen on the bed in the spare chamber.”

Shylock pulled his chair closer to the fire and sipped at his coffee, trying to warm something inside of him that refused to thaw.

* * *

He slept late the following morning, and woke at the sound of voices.

“Your _father_ , sweet? Why has he come here?”

“I know not. I suppose he missed us.”

“Perhaps.” Lorenzo sounded doubtful, but he did not pursue the subject, much to Shylock’s relief. He did not intend to explain to anyone that his business was with the heiress of Belmont.

Shylock dressed hastily and joined his daughter and son-in-law in the kitchen. Lorenzo said good morrow, rather coolly, and a servant girl offered him cold meat and bread, all the while looking sideways at him as if he were a strange beast in a menagerie. He wondered how on earth he would go about making conversation with these people, and how soon he could return to Venice without drawing attention to his odd behavior.

A welcome diversion arrived after breakfast, in the form of a red-haired young man who burst into the house and collapsed dramatically against the wall.

“Lorenzo, my good friend, lend me thirty ducats or else I die the death.”

Lorenzo did not seem particularly alarmed at this unorthodox greeting. “What death are you talking about, Gratiano?”

“No less a death than that of Agamemnon.”

“Agamemnon?”

“Nerissa will kill me if she learns how much I lost at dice. I think she would not stoop at stabbing me in the bath. Come, Lorenzo, there’s a good man. I’ll pay thee back o’ Tuesday.”

“After you double them at dice, I suppose?” Jessica asked sarcastically. “What happens if you lose again?”

“I’ll not lose again. They were false dice, I swear. I ought never to have played with the man who brought them. He had the look of a Jew.”

“ _Shhhhhh!_ ” said Lorenzo.

“What?” Gratiano looked around for the first time. “Oh.” He turned to Shylock, swept off his hat, and bowed deeply. “The fair Jessica’s father, I presume. You are welcome, sir, for her sake.”

“I am welcome, am I? I did not know that this was your house.”

Jessica made a sound that might have been a snort. Possibly, Shylock thought, he might acknowledge her as his daughter after all.

“My house? No, no, Nerissa and I live in the other cottage. You must come and dine with us tonight. We’re having a small farewell dinner, just a few friends, you know, in honor of Antonio. He leaves for Venice tomorrow.” Gratiano realized, belatedly, that Jessica and Lorenzo were staring at him in open-mouthed astonishment. “Oh. I had forgot about you and Antonio. Well, what’s past is past, all friends now, eh?” He clapped Shylock on the shoulder, pocketed the thirty ducats, and strode off.

“You had better make a memorandum of his debt,” said Jessica to Lorenzo.

“ _What_ is that young man thinking?” Shylock demanded, as soon as he had recovered his powers of speech.

“He does not think, most of the time,” said Jessica. “But there’s no harm in him.”

“The last time I saw him, he was calling for me to be hanged. Do you not call that harm?”

“He has forgotten.” Jessica glanced at Lorenzo, who was busy trying to make sense of his account book. “They are forgetful people,” she added in a quieter voice. “I do not always understand them. But it is a – a generous forgetfulness. I have ofttimes been glad of it.”

“‘They?’ You do not count yourself one of them?”

“Sometimes I do,” she said, and then shook her head. “No. I am always a stranger here.”

“You might come back to Venice,” he said. “I could say you are a widow, and you could keep house for me; I cannot get a servant to stay since Lancelot left me.”

For some reason, Jessica did not jump at this offer. “Were we not called strangers in Venice? Where are we not strangers?”

Shylock did not answer. There had been a time, he thought sadly, when they had had their own community in Venice, and he had not felt himself to be a foreigner there. That time was gone.

“We have become Christians,” Jessica added bitterly. “Is that not enough?”

“No. It is too much already.” Again he felt that dull edge of anger. What did his daughter mean by “we”? It had taken all the Duke’s power and the threat of death to force him to convert, and she had renounced her heritage casually, voluntarily. What right had she to regret her choice now, if she was regretting it?

“What did you say, love?” Lorenzo interrupted. “Come here and help me with these accounts; I cannot make head or tail of them.”

Jessica came to the window and looked at the book. Shylock put on his spectacles and looked, too.

“You know not how to keep an account-book,” he informed his son-in-law. “This is all haphazard, and very ill writ; I wonder you can make any use of it at all.”

Lorenzo glared at him. “You write it, then!”

“I think I will,” said Shylock. “That is my money you are hazarding.”

* * *

He spent most of the day putting Lorenzo and Jessica’s accounts in order. He was not quite sure why he was taking so many pains on their behalf, but it was easier than trying to converse with his son-in-law, and he rather enjoyed the work.

“You are not so far in debt as I had thought,” he informed Lorenzo at the end of the day. “If you would not spend so much on wine and candles, you might live well enough within your means. You must stop lending money to Gratiano, though, or at the least charge him usance.”

“He is my friend!” said Lorenzo. “I would not take interest from a friend, even if God did not forbid it.”

“As you will. But God doth not command you to lend money to a friend who repays it but one time in ten.”

“I _told_ you Gratiano never pays what he owes,” said Jessica.

Lorenzo shrugged. “He will give us a good dinner.”

“He had better,” said Shylock.

* * *

Shylock accompanied his daughter and son-in-law to Gratiano’s house for dinner. He could not think of a suitable excuse, and besides, he rather enjoyed the idea of turning up at Antonio’s farewell dinner and discomfiting the rest of the company. Lorenzo was clearly embarrassed by his presence, and the other guests looked gratifyingly uneasy, but nobody alluded to the past except Bassanio’s incorrigible servant Lancelot, who insisted on setting all of the places except Shylock’s with a very long spoon.

Dinner turned out to be roast pork and a dish of artichokes cooked with ham. Shylock was not sure whether this menu signified malice or thoughtlessness on Gratiano’s part, but he ate heartily. Why not? He was a Christian, after all. He could have wished that they had offered something else for Jessica’s sake; his daughter took nothing but bread. Gratiano’s wife noticed this, too, and offered her olives and fruit. Shylock decided that he did not mind Gratiano’s wife. The rest of them could all go to hell.

Portia greeted him politely when he first arrived, giving no sign that she had ever met him before. A particularly alert observer might have noticed that she neither looked at him nor spoke to him after that, even though she kept up a flood of witty chatter with all of the other guests. Luckily none of the other people at the table was such an observer. They drank a great deal of wine, especially the men, and still more after dinner as they toasted Antonio. It seemed that business would detain him in Venice for some time, and Bassanio was becoming positively maudlin at the thought of his absence.

“Come to Venice when thou canst. I’ll see thee well lodged,” Antonio promised, with barely a hint of innuendo on the last few words.

“With all my heart,” said Bassanio. “Thou knowest Belmont is as a prison to me without thy presence.”

Shylock glanced at Portia. She did not show any outward sign of displeasure, but her lips shaped the words _In the summerhouse. Midnight._ He nodded.

* * *

Shylock had left most of his own clothes in the village inn; staying with Lorenzo and Jessica had not been part of the plan. He borrowed Lorenzo’s heaviest cloak and the blanket from the spare-room bed before he crept out of the house. He was no young lover, warmed by the heat of his blood, and as revenges went, this one was neither clever nor destructive enough to be worth dying of an ague.

Portia was there before him. She unpinned his cloak and spread it on the floor of the summerhouse. Again, they came together hastily and did not speak. Only afterwards did Shylock discover that cloaks and blankets changed matters; they made it tempting to huddle together, pulling the covers tightly over their bodies, rather than dressing quickly in the cold night air.

Portia murmured something that he did not catch, and he asked her to speak up.

“I said, why are you here?”

“The same reason you are here. I hate your husband, and I saw an opportunity.”

“You have more reason to hate me.” She was a clever woman, that was certain, and one not given to illusions. “That is your real reason. You hated me and wanted to see me soiled, stained, an adulteress.”

That had, indeed, been his real reason. But it came to him now that something had changed, probably around the same time he had entered his daughter’s house. He would not have come to the summerhouse this second time if Portia had not summoned him, and now that he _was_ here, he could have wished himself almost anywhere else.

“And what of your part in this?” he said. “Why are _you_ here? Do you also hate yourself?”

“I do not know. Sometimes. Yes.”

She was very young, he realized. Perhaps two or three years older than Jessica, at the most. Would that he had not come.

“It is as well that this has happened. My husband has some cause to spend his nights in Venice now. Before – I had given him none.”

“Why did you marry him?” Shylock asked after a moment. It was not that he cared about Portia’s marriage, but he was curious. It had been a strange match: a young prodigal with nothing to recommend him but his face and manners, and a woman who had wealth, beauty, _and_ wit.

“I had no choice. My father left a strange will –”

“I had heard. ‘Twould be stranger if you had not followed your own will. Young women generally do.”

“You are right,” said Portia after a moment. “I cheated at the casket-game. I do not know whether he would have had the wit to choose rightly if I had not helped him.”

“You do not know?” It seemed a curious thing for a clever woman not to know her husband’s nature after two years.

“Hazarding comes naturally to him. He might have chosen the right casket for that reason alone. But he might have been easily led by appearances, as the others were, if I had not instructed my servants to play a song warning against such vanity.” She began to sing, under her breath.

_It is engendered in the eyes;_  
With gazing fed, and fancy dies  
In the cradle where it lies – 

She broke off. “You see that I did not enchant him with my singing voice. Were I a Siren, Ulysses had no need to tie himself to the mast.” And, in a few words, the vulnerable girl who had huddled next to him was the lady of Belmont again, witty and poised, and the time was past for confessions. The quickness of the transformation startled Shylock. He handed her her cloak almost instinctively; one did such services for great ladies.

They did not speak again until they had dressed. “My husband will leave for Venice within these three days,” she said. “If you are still here – and if you will – you might come to the house. It is warmer there.”

“I may. If I am still here.” Even as he spoke, he thought that he must be mad. A sane man would start for Venice tonight, or would never have come in the first place.

The last thing she said was under her breath; he did not think he was meant to hear. “Gold without and dry bones within. Perhaps he has the thing he would have chosen.”


	2. Who Chooseth Me Shall Get As Much As He Deserves

Of course it was madness, and of course Shylock stayed. He told himself it was only the natural madness of the flesh; what man would not have taken what Portia was offering, especially after so many years alone? Besides, Lorenzo insisted that he remain their guest. Shylock had unexpectedly become his son-in-law’s favorite person after discovering a loophole in the Duke’s tax codes that could save Lorenzo and Jessica fifty ducats a year. Before he knew it, Lorenzo had bragged to his friends, and he had a dozen young gentlemen living beyond their means begging for his advice.

He charged ten percent of everything he saved them, and still they kept calling at Lorenzo’s. They came furtively, as if they suspected there was some witchcraft in what he did, but they all wanted his services. It was exactly like being a money-lender. He felt right at home.

The incompetence of most of the young gentlemen alternately angered and amused him. “Did your friends not learn simple arithmetic when they were children?” he asked his son-in-law.

Lorenzo shook his head. “We learned to write letters in the style of Cicero, and to spoil a fair hand so that no one would mistake us for a secretary or a scrivener. That is all I remember.”

Shylock rolled his eyes. “Teach my grandson the Christian prayers if you will,” he said to Jessica, “but for God’s sake teach him to add and divide.”

“I will teach my child as I see fit!” said Jessica.

“I think our good father is right, my dear,” said Lorenzo. “I never could see the use of Cicero.” 

Shylock permitted himself a sardonic smile at this. Evidently, fifty ducats a year were enough to change him from a bad father-in-law to a good father.

* * *

Three days after Antonio’s departure, Bassanio followed him to Venice. On the fourth day, a messenger brought a note from Portia: Would Shylock do her the favor of sparing a few hours to look over the accounts at Belmont? She would see that his services were generously rewarded.

Jessica frowned when she read the note. “Is there no steward at Belmont to attend to such matters?”

“Who, old Lucio?” said Lorenzo. “I’d be surprised if he knows a seven from a nine.”

Jessica said nothing, but she was still frowning when Shylock left the house.

* * *

Lorenzo and Jessica’s house – which they called a cottage, though it was far bigger than any cottage Shylock had ever seen – stood within the grounds of Belmont. Nevertheless, it took Shylock a quarter of an hour to walk up the avenue to the great house, for Belmont was the sort of country house that people built when they could afford to live out of sight of the source of their wealth. No ploughmen worked the acres around it, and no vineyards were planted; there were only beds of bright flowers, ornamental hedges, and a park where deer ran free, at least until the lord and lady of the house wanted venison.

It was not the sort of house Shylock would have chosen to build, even in the days of his prosperity. He could not imagine living so far from Venice; he would have missed the smells of salt and pitch and a thousand nameless things rotting into slime, the glittering palaces, the crowds of young men making and losing fortunes. Here, everything was still. Belmont rose clean and white, its pillars meticulously imitated from Roman temples. It was not his world. He did not know whether to knock at the door or to slink about looking for a side entrance; a servant ended his perplexity by meeting him in the avenue and escorting him inside.

He was an elderly man, and too deaf to understand much of what Shylock said, but evidently he had instructions to bring Shylock to the lady of the house. If the servant thought it was odd that she received him in a bedchamber, he expressed no sign of it. Well trained, Shylock thought.

Portia dismissed the servant. “You are welcome to Belmont, Signor Shylock. Shall we begin?”

He stared at her. Before he could ask just _what_ she thought they were to begin, another servant’s voice called, “My lady!”

“Excuse me,” said Portia. “Let me leave you with some earnest of my return.”

The kiss she gave him almost took away his powers of reason, but he kept enough of his wits about him to take note of where she had brought him. This was a lady’s chamber, with lace curtains and a picture of the Madonna and child. In great houses, he knew, husbands and wives had separate bedchambers, even when the marriage was much happier than Portia and Bassanio’s seemed to be.

If a wife were so angry with her husband that she wanted to cuckold him in the most humiliating way possible, would she not take her lover to her _husband’s_ bed? So. This argued for something more complicated and dangerous than mere anger. This was a woman who wanted him to know her.

Very well; he had nothing better to do at the moment, so he would humor her by looking at her bookshelves. One could tell a great deal about people from their reading. There were romances, of course. _Orlando furioso, Gerusalemme liberata_ ; Jessica also read such ridiculous tales. He supposed that was where girls got the idea of disguising themselves and going off on mad adventures. 

Dante; Castiglione; and, incongruously, a pile of law books. Evidently she had never let go of the fantasy of being Signor Bellario.

A scrap of white silk caught his eye. She had left her handkerchief on one of the bookshelves, rather carelessly; it was embroidered with her initial. That was foolish of her, he thought. He had heard of a Venetian who had done great mischief with just such a toy.

Now he could hear her step again in the corridor. Suppose she asked him again why he had come. What should he say? “The same reason you have sent for me; I was lonely”? It was impossible to admit to that.

She did not ask him that. As it turned out, she was in the mood for an even more unsettling conversation.

“How do you like my house?” She stood a little apart from him, as if welcoming a stranger.

“It is magnificent, my lady.”

“Is it as fine as the one near Venice, the one they call _La Malcontenta_?”

“I do not know. I have little experience of country villas. I have not often been invited to them.”

She took a step closer. “Shylock? Why are the Jews still Jews?”

“What?” 

“I mean, would it not be easier for them to become Christians? Then they might dress as they liked, and go where they liked.”

For a split second Shylock considered slapping her in the face, but he decided that this would be unjustified. It seemed to be a sincere question, if an utterly stupid one.

“Suppose the Turk were to invade Venice,” he said after a moment. “Would you then say that all the Christians in Venice should become followers of Mahomet? Would not that be easier?”

“That is not the same.”

“Why not?” he asked, and when Portia hesitated instead of answering, he said, “I know, I know. You think it is different because your religion holds the only truth, and you want all the world to be Christians so that they may be saved. But consider this: The Turks believe the same about Mahomet. Where is the difference?”

“So the Turks and the Jews are the same as Christians? Is that what you mean to say?”

“No. Jews do not seek to make the whole world Jewish. In that they are different from you, and from the Turk. Why is it so hard, then, for you to leave them in peace?”

He noticed that he kept saying _you_ and _they_ when he tried to explain things to Portia, never _we_. He wasn't sure he had a _we_ any more. He resolved to curb his tongue. Men had been denounced as false converts for saying less than he had just spoken, and he must not forget that the woman beside him was also Balthasar the lawyer. He ought never to have come.

“I do not think,” he said, putting on his cloak, “that your account-books are in much need of my attention.”

“You have not looked at them.”

“Just so. You have not brought them.”

“A touch, I do confess.” Her laugh was a little strained. “You are going to Jessica and Lorenzo’s house?”

“No. I am going home to Venice.” He recalled that Bassanio was also in Venice, and that this might sound very like a threat. “You will not be troubled with me any more, my lady. We have both trespassed where we should not.”

* * *

“You had much better stay with us until morning,” said Lorenzo. “You might still come to Venice tomorrow night if you rode fast enough, and you cannot be there tonight.”

“I have business along the way. I will leave now.”

“What business?” asked Jessica sharply.

“Not moneylending,” said Shylock, stalling for time, “if that is what you are asking.”

“That is not what I asked at all!”

Hastily, Shylock invented a debt that had to be paid that very evening in Padua, which lay some hours north of Belmont. Jessica did not look as if she believed him, and with good reason; it had never been his way to let such matters wait until the eleventh hour.

“Take my horse,” Lorenzo offered. “You can send him back with Bassanio.”

This was a generous offer, and one that Shylock could not find any reasonable excuse to refuse. Besides, as anxious as he was to avoid any further encounters with Bassanio, he was also desperate to get away from Belmont.

“Will you come again?” Jessica asked when Lorenzo went to saddle the horse.

“I do not think so.”

She looked up at him, a hundred questions in her eyes, but said nothing. He started talking to fill the silence.

“Write to me when your child is born. Look that you eat well, and do not go wandering about in the night air. And remember what I said about teaching him arithmetic!”

Jessica laughed, for no reason that Shylock could see. He wondered how he and Leah could have produced such an absurdly giddy girl. “Someday, Father,” she said, “you will learn what to say on such occasions.”

“God keep you, and send you safe deliverance.”

“That is better.” Jessica leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek, and then she went back into the house and was gone.

* * *

Shylock rode hard until dusk, trying to put as much distance as possible between himself and Belmont. In the morning he felt calmer; his bones ached from the last night’s ride, so he took his time in traveling to Venice. It had been a mad adventure, the sort of thing men did only once in their lives, when they felt the last embers of their youth turning to ashes. He would not think on it any longer.

It was quite late when he reached his house. On the following morning he strolled down to the Rialto, more out of long habit than because he had any particular business to transact. Besides, it was useful to learn the price of merchandise and the names of the ships that had lately come to harbor.

The afternoon was already fading when he noticed the boy. He could not say what first drew his attention, but some instinct warned him that he was being watched – though the youth’s eyes were hidden under one of the large, plumed hats that were in fashion, and though he seemed to be wandering aimlessly. So Shylock watched, too, as the boy lounged against a wall, threw one leg over a bridge, tossed a coin to a vendor and ate a skewer of meat – all the careless poses of idle Venetian youth. Too careless, and too posed.

He waited until dusk had fallen to approach the figure. “Why are you here?” he demanded.

Before his eyes, a little of the insouciance went out of the boy’s posture; she turned her face toward his, and became more girl than boy. “It seems to me that I gave you offense, the last time we spoke. I did not mean to. I have not come to make excuses for myself, but to pray your pardon.”

“You came to _Venice_ to say that?” he asked, staggered.

“I had little else to occupy my time.” She thrust her thumbs into her belt, and her voice deepened. “Besides, I am a simple country lad, born but five miles from Venice; ‘twas not a long journey.”

He had to admit she was a good actress, but he was not in the mood for her games. “You are a woman, and far from home. You ought not to commit your safety to a strange city and a man of ill repute.”

“I do not think you would do me any harm.”

“Why not?” he asked. “I can assure you, in this city you will find men enough who will tell you I will stop at nothing to destroy an enemy.”

“I would not believe them, for I have given you your chance already. You might have taken my girdle, or some other trifle from my chamber, and gone to my husband with it. But you did not; everything was as I had left it.”

He stared at her. He, too, had seen that he had an opportunity, but it had not occurred to him that she had left him alone on _purpose_.

“Suppose I had,” he said. “What would you have done then?”

She shrugged. “I suppose I should have found some story that would satisfy my husband.”

“Aye – you would have wept pretty, false tears, as great ladies do, and told him you were sore in need of money and had gone to the false Jew in secret for a loan, and he had demanded some pretty toy of yours as surety, and you had given it him in all innocence. And yes, he would have believed you and seen me hanged as high as Haman. A clever piece of work, my lady. I congratulate you.”

Portia flushed. “Why are you so angry at me for a thing I did not do? It is as if I were angry at you for stealing my girdle, when you did no such thing!”

He did not know how to explain why he was so angry. Partly, it was because he knew how near he had come. If he had still been in the same frame of mind as when he first came to Belmont, he would have gone to Bassanio. He did not intend to tell Portia that, but he tried to explain the other thing that angered him about her. “You are still setting traps for men and trying to make them stumble upon their own weaknesses. What right have you to do that? Who made you judge?”

“Why is it wrong to try people and prove the truth of what they are?”

Again, he did not know how to answer. The best answer he could give her was that there was no simple truth to people; a man who was weak in one hour might be stronger at any other time, but if you sprung your trap at the wrong moment you might never know his strength. Or, as in this case, you might not know his weakness. Portia seemed to have decided, absurdly, that he was a man to be trusted, and he found that he could not tell her he was no such thing.

He couldn’t very easily walk away, either, because he saw at once that she was not as much at home in Venice as she pretended. She kept looking about her, gawking at the gondoliers and the houses whose front steps ended in water, and she stopped at each new alley and canal that they crossed, uncertain of her way in the endless knot of the city. So he said “Follow me,” shortly, and led her to his house. It was the best thing he could think to do. It was the eve of a festival; Venice was full of music tonight, and the young men had already begun to drink and quarrel. He did not like to think of what they might do if they discovered the boy behind him was really a young woman. 

He did not like Portia, not at all, but neither did he want to see her raped or beaten or thrown into a canal. And so he took her to his house, because there was nowhere else to go.

But the little fool kept wanting to linger in the streets and watch the revelers. She reminded him of Jessica, on the rare occasions when he had allowed his daughter to accompany him to the Rialto. These young women were all the same, intoxicated with the open air and the illusion of freedom. Well, perhaps he would have felt the same way if he had been born a woman.

“Come,” he said. “I would not have you seen with me.”

“Why not?” she asked, laughing a little. “No one will know me.”

“Because people will think that I have gone back to moneylending, or else taken up sodomy. I do not care to face the Duke in either case.”

She laughed again at that. Well, he supposed he had meant it to be funny, but he was not used to other people being amused by his jokes.

Shylock had bought a new house, not in the Jewish ghetto but just outside of it. There was little pleasure in becoming a Christian, after all, if one could not annoy the other Christians by moving in next door. Besides, he could not afford to keep up his old house. This one was smaller, and fortuitously inconspicuous.

“In here,” he said, unlocking the door. He had no servants living with him any more, only a woman who came in by day to cook and clean, so he had no fear of their being spotted. The old fool had forgotten to fasten the shutters on the upstairs windows again. He hastened to shut them against the clamor of fifes and tabors.

“Do you not care for music?” Portia asked.

“No.”

“I have heard it said that men who take no pleasure in music are little better than beasts, for they have no harmony in their souls.”

He stared at her for a moment, and then told her of a night he had never spoken about to any Christian. He had been a child then, in another country; there had been drunken singing, and the squealing of pipes mingling with the icy note of shattering glass. Jewish houses had been torched, and in the morning one of their neighbors had been found by the side of the road, an old man beaten to death for sport.

“So. Such men are better than beasts because they have harmony in their souls. It is an interesting notion. I must think about it some more.”

She took a step toward him. She was touching him, in the way that women touch men when their business is comfort. She had never done that before. He meant to pull away, but he let her hand linger for a moment.

“Shylock, I thought what I did was for the best.”

He had known that. He had seen them all congratulating themselves inwardly as he left the court, thinking that they had done all for the best. How could it _not_ be a blessing to be made a Christian, after all?

He was about to tell her all the reasons she was wrong, when he realized she already knew. He remembered what it was like when the certitude of one’s first youth had given way to the perplexity of three- or four-and-twenty, and forbore to say anything more.


	3. Who Chooseth Me Must Give and Hazard All He Hath

Shylock was awakened the next morning by a pounding at his door. Portia was curled comfortably beside him, like a kitten, and he thought for a moment that he would ignore the knocking; but it grew more insistent, and at last he pulled on his gown and went down the stairs. Lancelot Gobbo, his worthless ex-servant, was standing on his threshold.

“My dear old master! Let me in, I pray you, else I have no place to lay my head.”

“Bassanio has grown weary of thy pranks, has he? Or short of money? Well, well, ‘tis all one. I told thee thou wouldst not last long in his service.”

Lancelot showed alarming signs of being about to grovel at his feet. “If you let me in, I will kiss your worship’s hand. I will –”

“I had rather thou didst _not_ – but come in. Thou’lt wake the neighbors.” Shylock seized Lancelot by the arm and half-dragged him inside.

“They are already woken. ‘Tis past nine o’clock.” Lancelot looked at him, talking in the gown and slippers for the first time. “I say, when were you wont to lie abed so late, master? Are you new-married as well as new-christened? Some maid of fifteen or sixteen summers, perhaps, as befits a man of your age?”

“Never mind that. _No_ , I am not married. What dost thou here? Where is Bassanio?”

“If I knew that, master, I would have no need to do anything here,” said Lancelot. “My master Bassanio went to the mainland at first light with Signor Antonio; they had not returned when the quarantine was proclaimed, and I locked out of the house, for Nell our kitchen-maid – a good wench, but somewhat sunburned and black in the teeth – but no matter that, I’d tumble her if she’d have me – will not let me in for fear of the smallpox.”

“Quarantine?” asked Shylock, now wide awake. “Smallpox? Tell the story properly, you fool. And leave the kitchen-maid out.”

“‘Tis she that hath left _me_ out, I tell you. I went to the docks to learn what ships had come in – and to see if there were oysters, for my master and Antonio have a great appetite for oysters – and what do I hear, but that a ship has arrived from Illyria, and before they were here for a day, the greater part of the crew fell sick with smallpox. Venice is under quarantine. No one can go in or out of the city.”

“If this is one of thy jests, Lancelot, I will flay thee alive.”

Lancelot looked genuinely alarmed at this. “No jest, master, I swear it!”

“Well. So thou would’st return to my service.” Shylock clutched his forehead and tried to think. The last thing he needed was Lancelot bearing tales to Bassanio; but, on the other hand, if this story about a smallpox epidemic was true, he was in a world of trouble and a servant would be no bad thing to have. He would need help from some quarter, that was certain.

Unexpectedly, he thought of Tubal, who was the closest thing he had to a friend. “Be of some use,” he said to Lancelot. “Go and fetch Tubal, if they have not locked the ghetto, or find some way to bear a message to him. One moment; I will write him a letter.”

He dashed off a note to Tubal, doing his best to convey the urgency of his plight without actually committing any of the details to paper. Lancelot could not read, but it was like as not that he would lose the note or give it to the wrong person. “Take this to him, and look that you stay until he has read it and given you some answer.” He recalled that he had almost nothing to eat in the house, and handed Lancelot a ducat. “Buy some food if any of the shops are open. If not, bring this back straightaway. No idling!”

As soon as Lancelot had gone, Portia rose from the landing of the stairs. She had been crouching there, unseen; Shylock wondered how long she had been listening.

“You heard that?”

She nodded. “My husband will return to Belmont as soon as he finds that Venice is closed. Where else would he go?” She bit her lower lip.

“And you do not want him to find you gone, after all.”

“No. He would not be able to hold up his head again. I did not care, I wanted to shame him, but now – No.”

“You might have thought of that before you left for Venice,” Shylock couldn’t resist pointing out.

“I know. Would that this quarantine had happened yesterday! I half-hoped that something like it would prevent me from coming here.”

“You did?” He thought of her as he had seen her on the Rialto, eager and a little intoxicated with freedom.

“I felt like one on the brink of doing some glorious and fatal thing. It was a thing I had wanted, and long dreamt of, and could not draw back from doing – and yet, I wished for someone to stay my hand and stop me in my folly, for I could not stop by my own power. Do men feel like that when they go to war, I wonder?” She looked up at him. “Have you ever felt so?”

“Once.”

“What happened?”

“You.” He had never admitted this before, even to himself; but he remembered the knife trembling in his hands, and some part of him had been desperately grateful when she had cried, _Tarry!_

It took a moment for this to sink in. “Oh,” she said softly. “I had been thinking all I did was for ill.”

“No.” He sat down on the stairs beside her. “You saved a life. Two lives, most like, for I do not think the good people of Venice would have let me reach my house alive if I had killed him. That is something.”

She smiled without humor. “And now, I see I am to destroy two lives, one of them my own. I am not sure that I like the exchange.”

He took both of her hands in his. “I will help you, if I can. Let us think. You must have told some story to your servants. Where do they think you are?”

“They think I am with Nerissa and her son, visiting her old mother. She lives about six miles from here, on the road to Treviso. I meant to go to there at once if I heard my husband had left Venice; I would be there before he knew where to look for me, and I would trust Nerissa with my life. Is there any way to leave Venice during a quarantine?”

“None, unless you go unseen and at night. Tubal might have the means to help us.”

“Who is Tubal?”

Tubal was one of Shylock’s oldest friends. He had not turned his back on Shylock when he converted, but there was another cause of awkwardness between them. Since half of his goods were forfeit and he was no longer permitted to practice his trade, Shylock had taken six months to scrape together enough money to repay what Tubal had spent in searching for his daughter. Tubal had tried to refuse at first; Shylock had insisted, for it was a point of pride with him; Tubal had accepted, but refused to take a penny of interest. “You are still of my tribe,” he had said. Shylock had known that he was no such thing, by the laws of Venice as well as by his own reckoning, and had forced Tubal to take the interest to which he was legally entitled. And ever since then, the two had been as distant acquaintances.

Shylock tried to explain this history to Portia, who found it utterly baffling. “I do not understand why you are making such ado over money. Is it because you are Jews?”

“It is because we are Venetians. Money is the language we speak. If you told this story to your husband and Antonio, I assure you they would understand it well enough.”

She considered this. “Maybe you are right. I have never been able to make my husband understand that money is not everything.”

“You speak as one who has always had it, my lady. Money is love, hatred, shame, honor, a blessing, a curse, power, pain, death – How is that not everything?”

“There is more in the world,” she insisted, although she didn’t explain what. “If you were to die of smallpox tomorrow, would you not want to meet God thinking of something other than what you had, and what good you had failed to do with it?”

“I’m not going to die of smallpox tomorrow,” said Shylock in some annoyance. “I had it years ago.” But Portia was gazing off into space, not seeming to hear him, and it came to him that by _you_ she had actually meant _I_. “ _You’re_ not going to die of smallpox either. You have been here less than a day, and you have not been consorting with sailors – have you?”

She smiled a little at that. “No. I think I can, as yet, confine myself to one adventure at a time.” After a moment, she added, “I am half-starved,” not seeming to notice any incongruity in this change of topic. “Have you anything for breakfast?”

Shylock looked in the cupboards. There were some vegetables he had forgotten about, in varying stages of dessication, and half a salt codfish. He was sure that Leah would have been able to make a delicious meal out of these unprepossessing ingredients. He was equally sure that neither he nor Portia knew how to do anything of the sort. “Come and look for yourself.”

Portia looked. “You have to soak codfish, do you not? I have heard the servants talk of it.”

“For at least a day.”

It was a great relief when Tubal and Lancelot returned, laden with a roast fowl, several loaves of bread, and two bottles of wine. Tubal was a big man with a big laugh, and Shylock could tell that Portia rather liked him. He hoped she wouldn’t take it into her head to convert him.

“I am sorry to be so late,” he said. “They have locked the ghetto because of the quarantine.”

“How did you come here, then?”

“Rooftops,” said Tubal. “Lancelot showed me the way.”

“What, at your age!” said Shylock, genuinely shocked.

Tubal laughed and gave Portia a sideways glance. “While you, of course, always conduct yourself with perfect maturity and dignity, and this is why you have sent me a letter saying that you are in some trouble which you cannot explain, but you need a boat so that you can break the quarantine under cover of darkness. I see.”

“Never you mind. We were not talking of me.”

“Do you mean to introduce me to your friend?”

“This is Signor Balthasar, a young lawyer of Padua.”

“Ah. Trouble that requires a lawyer. Better and better.”

“He is not here because I need his services. I will explain later. Lancelot! Go and carve the fowl for dinner.”

As soon as Lancelot had gone, Shylock looked at Portia. She considered Tubal for a moment, then nodded.

“You know Signor Bassanio? Well. Balthasar is his wife.”

Tubal burst into raucous laughter. “His wife! Ha ha! I’ve no doubt that Bassanio _would_ take just such a wife, if his church would allow it!”

Portia glared at him, and then took off her hat and unpinned her hair. “You mistake, sir. I am a woman, and his wife.”

Tubal had the good grace to blush. “I beg your pardon, my lady. There are jests men make, when they think they are alone – Well. I spoke idly, and meant no offense.”

“You could not have given me more offense than my husband has already given,” said Portia shortly, covering her head again.

Tubal looked from Shylock to Portia, suddenly working out how Signor Bassanio’s wife had come to be in Shylock’s house, and in such a disguise. “Oh. Oh, my God. I think I understand why you wrote to me.”

Portia flushed. “Oh, is there no way to untie this knot?”

“Of course not!” Shylock snapped. “Do you think this is a comedy played on the stage?”

Tubal chuckled. “Perhaps it _is_ a comedy played on the stage. It is certainly absurd enough.”

Shylock glared at him. “I do not find it amusing!”

“That, my friend, is because we Jews are always cast in the villain’s parts.” Tubal grew sober, and considered the situation. “You asked if I could get you a boat, the smaller and less conspicuous the better. I do not think that will be any trouble. What ho, Lancelot!”

Lancelot appeared, gnawing on a wing of the fowl.

“Go and seek out Signor Adriano,” said Tubal, and then added quickly, “No, not _now_ , fool, after dinner is served!” as Lancelot sprang toward the door. “Dost hear me? Tell him I need to borrow his boat. If he says no, remind him that he owes me a thousand ducats and the bond was due two days ago.”

Obediently, Lancelot served dinner and left, helping himself to a drumstick on the way out.

Portia said at first that she would have some of the codfish instead, as it was Friday. She discovered, in short order, _why_ it was necessary to soak salt codfish overnight, peeled a carrot instead, and sat gnawing on it resentfully. After half an hour she gave in and helped herself to what was left of the chicken. Shylock was grateful for this, as it improved her temper considerably.

Tubal refilled their wine glasses. They waited. From time to time, Portia glanced out the window; the watch, she said, was patrolling the streets, though it was broad daylight. Tubal told a complicated story about a constable of the watch, a washerwoman with loose morals, and a goat, which he swore had really happened in Mantua but which Shylock was sure he had found in a jest-book. They waited some more.

Lancelot returned late in the afternoon with Signor Adriano’s boat. Shylock told him to go out and moor it where it would not be noticed, and turned to Tubal with relief. “I have left a good horse stabled at the Elephant. You must take us there tonight, as soon as it is dark.”

“Tomorrow night,” Tubal corrected. “I cannot take you tonight. That would be breaking the Sabbath.”

“BREAKING. THE. SABBATH?!” If Tubal had been ten years younger, Shylock would gladly have hit him; as things were, he merely looked daggers at him. “Why, man, I’ve seen you break the Sabbath a hundred times!”

“And so I do, when it is needful to do so. I think that it is not needful now.”

In the past, Tubal’s definition of “needful” had encompassed pretty nearly everything from doing business with Christians to undertaking the search for Jessica. Mindful that he did owe Tubal some gratitude for the last, Shylock decided not to yell at him again. “How do you reckon that?”

“The lady’s husband left Venice this morning; so. He comes back to find it under quarantine; so. If he returns home at once, and rides post-haste to Belmont, he might come there this evening; so. He finds his wife gone, and the servants say she has gone with her waiting-gentlewoman to visit that gentlewoman’s mother, who is a very respectable widow living near Treviso. He has no reason to be alarmed, or to think she has lied about where she is going. Does a sane man turn around and ride all night? No. _If_ he feels any need to seek her out before she comes home – and ‘tis like as not that he would stay home and wait for her – he would not leave until the morning. Another day’s journey; so. He does not come until the next night at the soonest, and only if he has a very good reason to hurry, which he does not. There is no hurry for us, then, and no need to break the Sabbath.”

Shylock had to admit that Tubal’s logic was almost as impeccable as it was infuriating.

“Besides,” Tubal added as Lancelot came back into the room, “do you not have a great deal of business to discuss with Signor Balthasar of Padua?”

“On the contrary. I think that Signor Balthasar and I have little more to say to each other.”

“The less you think you have to say,” said Tubal enigmatically, “the more needful it is that you should say it. For my part, I am going to sleep. I am, as you were so kind as to remind me this morning, an old man.” He folded his arms and closed his eyes.

“Is he always like this?” Portia whispered.

“No,” said Shylock. “Sometimes he makes you want to murder him.”

Portia choked back a laugh, and then grew quiet. Lancelot had gone to the kitchen; they were alone. She looked a little afraid.

“Come upstairs,” said Shylock. He was not at all sure what there was left to say, but he had rather not say it anywhere they were likely to have an audience.

Portia followed him.

“I could tell Lancelot to make up the bed in the next chamber for you,” he said awkwardly. He wasn’t even sure how she had ended up in his bed on the previous night, now that he thought of it.

Portia shook her head.

“What are you thinking, girl? You have said you have changed your mind about shaming your husband!”

“He will not be shamed.” Portia leaned her head against his shoulder, and he found that he was not, after all, able to push her away. “Or if he will, what’s done is done. How should tonight make any difference?”

How should it make any difference to Bassanio, indeed? It didn’t. It did, however, strip away the last fig leaf of a pretense that she had come here with any thought of revenge.

“You have _chosen_ him,” said Shylock, trying to be angry and not quite managing it. “You said yourself that you must go back to him.”

“So I must,” she murmured. “But not yet.”

* * *

An hour later, Shylock went down the stairs to fetch the other bottle of wine, thinking that they could both do with a drink. Tubal opened his eyes. “Well?”

“Well _what?_ ”

“Do you mean to marry her?”

“Certainly not.”

“Why not? ‘Twould be good for you to marry again; you have been alone since Jessica left, and I am worried for you.”

“I have never had any mind to marry again, and still less to marry _her_.”

“Why? You are in love with her.”

“Absurd.”

“And she with you.”

“Impossible,” said Shylock, fearing at once that it _was_ possible. The other, of course, was still absurd. “Besides, you have forgotten that she is married already.”

“Surely her husband would divorce her if he knew she was here with you.”

Shylock shook his head. “Christians. No divorce.”

“Sometimes even Christians agree to go their separate ways. It happens more often than you might think.”

“She will not. She means to keep her vows. After tomorrow, that is.”

Shylock himself thought this sounded absurd, but Tubal accepted it without a blink. “Ah. Bad luck. Yes, you had better take the rest of the wine. Good night.”

* * *

In the morning there were the usual noises from the street, men opening their shops for business and women gossiping. It took Shylock a moment to realize that this was not, in fact, usual at all in a time of quarantine.

He washed and dressed hastily. Portia was pinning up her hair in front of the glass, transforming herself once again into Signor Balthasar. He hesitated a moment, then went over and kissed her. They did not have enough time for any sort of pretense, least of all a pretense of indifference.

“You had better go,” she whispered when they were ready to speak again. “Find out what is happening. I will be with you in a moment.”

As Shylock went down the stairs, Tubal came in from the street. “Good news, good news! The quarantine is over, and your friend Signor Balthasar is free to leave. It seem that the sailors do not have smallpox after all, only chicken pox.”

Lancelot yelped and spat out the morsel of leftover fowl he had been eating for breakfast.

“What kind of fool of a doctor mistakes chicken pox for smallpox?” Shylock demanded, feeling unexpectedly cross with the world. He realized that he had been counting on this last day, and he began to fear that Tubal was right. He must have lost his wits.

“Who knows what doctors are thinking, most of the time? If it cannot be bled or purged away, what do they know about it? Ah, good morrow, Signor Balthasar. I trust you have slept well. How like you your entertainment here in Venice?”

Portia turned scarlet, and Shylock decided immediately that another day in the house with Tubal would not have been supportable, after all. “I do not know if you heard, but the quarantine has been lifted and you are free to travel. I will bring you part of the way, if you will.”

“Thank you. I should be glad of your company.”

* * *

At the Elephant, he helped Portia mount Lorenzo’s horse, hired another one for himself, and started down the road to Treviso. They did not speak until they were well away from Venice.

“If you should be with child –”

The swiftness of Portia’s answer startled him. “I took the precaution of making my husband drunk on the night before he left for Venice. I will do it again, for good measure.”

He had been going to give her the direction of an old woman in Venice who would induce a miscarriage for a small fee, and who was safer and more discreet than most of her kind, but he saw at once that Portia’s solution was better. Less risky, and perhaps happier, if anything about the present situation could be called happy. He remembered his first sight of her playing with Nerissa’s child, and thought, _yes, all may yet be for the best_.

They rode on a little way before Portia spoke again. “Think’st thou that Bassanio and I will ever be what a husband and wife ought to be to each other?”

“I do not know. Do you care for him?”

“I think that I have always cared for him.”

Shylock remembered something else from that day in the court. _Antonio, I am married to a wife which is as dear to me as life itself ..._

“I believe he cares for thee as well. And think of this. Antonio is twenty years older than Bassanio, at the least. He may die; or if he does not, ‘tis thy husband’s love that will die in time. Youth does not follow age as far as the brink of the grave.”

Portia flushed. “Sometimes it does!” she protested.

He was flattered by the vehemence of this declaration, but not deceived. “It does not,” he told her, as gently as he could. “It ought not. The world is as it is, not as you would re-make it if you could.”

“That is as well. If I could re-make it as I would, I would more likely mar it in the making.”

He knew without looking at her that she had that mirthless smile on her lips again, and wondered how he had ever thought her smug or self-satisfied. “Perhaps,” he said, “you have marred less than you think.”

Again they were silent for a little while. “I read in an old book that no one can be bound by a double love. Do you think that is always true?”

“No,” said Shylock at once. He did not know whether Portia was thinking of herself or of Bassanio, but he had proof enough that it was false when he thought of Leah, who had not lived to be much older than Portia was now. She had been a dark-eyed and prudent woman, wise beyond her years, so very different from the clever gambler riding beside him in boy’s clothes. He trusted that she would know him if they met in another life, and that she would forgive him this.

“Nerissa’s mother lives near here,” said Portia when they had come a little farther, “around the bend in the road. I had better go on alone.” She reined her horse and turned to look at him. “Shall we meet again, I wonder?”

“I think we will. I mean to visit my daughter. In a few months, perhaps, after the baby is born.” He paused, finding that it cost him an unexpected amount of effort to say what had to be said next. “We cannot – do what we have done – again. You know that?”

“Yes. I do know.” She had dismounted and taken one of her own gowns from the bundle she carried, pulling it on over her doublet and breeches as she spoke. “That is how I would have it.” Her head emerged from the mass of satin, and she unpinned her hair and allowed it to tumble over her shoulders. She looked slightly rumpled and overstuffed, but respectable. “It is time, I think, that you and I tried to do right. I do not know if it will come easily to me, but it will be a change.”

“For me, too.” He reached out a hand to smooth her hair, and let it linger a moment. “Farewell.”

“Farewell.”

He watched her until she had gone, and then he turned back to Venice, back to the cemetery in the Lido where Leah lay buried. For why should the living not talk to the dead? He had much to explain to his wife, and he trusted that, one way or another, she would hear. 

After that he would write to Jessica, perhaps not explaining everything just yet, but trying his best to do right.


End file.
